Great Popularity

Taranaki Daily News, 10 September 1940, Page 10

Great Popularity

Gracie Fields' Career Rated by almost any standard, Gracie Fields is the world's most successful show-woman, says the American magazine Time. She makes about £180,000 a year; £60,000 a picture, £1000 a week when touring England in vaudeville, the rest from broadcasting and royalties on gramophone records, which sell 1,000,000 a year. Far more extraordinary than her income is her popularity. Answering her fan mail costs £6000 a year. In an average week, she gets 500 requests to open

bazaars, beauty contests, etc., 350 a week to read new plays, thousands a week to launch new songs. At London Gracie Fields sometimes stops traffic, but on tour whole towns turn out when she arrives and she rides through mobbed streets, shouting, singing, naving her hands. In the U.S.A. cinema stars belong to a social class of their own which has no equivalent in England. This does not inconvenience Gracie Fields, who prefers to live in a style more in keeping with her humble origins. At London, her most ostentatious possession is a red brick house on Finchley Road. She sold her Rolls-Royce because "it was too posh for me." Daughter of a poor Rochdale engineer, Gracie Fields left school before she could

read and write fluently, spent a good deal of her childhood working as a cot-ton-winder at £1 a week, got into vaudeville, trouped for a shilling a week and keep. In 1916, when she was 18, she made her first hit in a play called "It's a Bargain," with Archie Pitt, whom she married seven years later. In 1918 she began appearing in "Mr. Tower of London." The show speedily became so famous that audiences got into the habit of chorusing the jokes with the star, and Gracie Fields' era in the British theatre began in earnest. On the stage, Gracie Fields is, if possible, less pretentious than in her private life. In "We're Going to be Rich" her comedy technique was polished up for U.S.A. audiences. In British music halls it is characterised by flea-scratching gestures, homely grimaces, broad Lancashire dialect. For holidays Gracie Fields usually goes to Capri, where she has a villa. In England her interests outside of work are movies, bicycles, orphans. She maintains a private asylum with 50 inmates near Brighton, has several sand piles and swings in her garden for the convenience of visiting children. In 1937 she visited Hollywood where most of the screen nobility had never heard of her. She rode in sight-seeing buses, soenl two weeks on the desert with Joan Crawford, bought herself a cowgirl outfit and spent a whole day with Shirley Temp'.e. Said Gracie: "I like me own country better."